ABSTRACT
We shall never approach a complete understanding of the nature of language, so long as we confine our attention to its intellectual function as a means of communicating thought. But this one-sidedness is to be seen in highly distinguished investigators. Hermann Paul in his admirable Rectorial Address on Volkerpsychologie (Munch en 1910) 1 says of the purpose of language: 'its original function is always however to serve as a means of imparting something.' No, neither its original function nor its present-day function. As to the origin of language, in my Progress in Language, and more recently in the final section of my book Language, I have tried to show that we only begin to divine what the origin of language was when after tracing back its history as far as we can, we see that the earliest language was anything but intellectual, that it was indeed a sort of half-way house between singing and speech with long almost meaningless conglomerations of sound.s, which served rather as an outlet for intense feelings than for an intelligible expression of them, and which in any case was not primarily thought of as a means of telling other people something or other, though by a roundabout way it did come eventually to serve as a means of communication.
